Man Says Dead Girls' Photo Led Him to Become Informer

By RICK BRAGG

Published: May 16, 2002

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., May 15—
Mitchell Burns, white haired at 75, said he used to be a believer in the Ku Klux Klan, back when talk of integration here had people lining up to join. But then a man from the federal government showed him pictures of four dead girls, and he changed his mind.

He said he stayed in the Klan, laughing and carousing and hitting every honky-tonk ''between here and Blount County'' with Bobby Frank Cherry, one of the men long suspected of bombing the 16th Street Baptist Church and killing four girls on a Sunday morning in September 1963.

But all the time he joked and drank and chased women with men like Mr. Cherry, he was gathering evidence, he said, hoping for proof that Mr. Cherry and three other men made and planted the bomb that killed the girls, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley. The F.B.I. after four years tired of paying him for beer runs and gasoline, Mr. Burns said in court today, and his career as an informer was over.

''I was coming to the truth,'' Mr. Burns bragged as he testified here today in the State of Alabama's murder trial of the now 71-year-old Mr. Cherry. ''And if I'd had enough time, I'd have got it.''

Mr. Cherry's lawyers, in a pointed and sometimes mocking cross-examination, tried to portray him as an unreliable witness at best -- even a joke -- and said Mr. Burns took the F.B.I.'s money only to get drunk. Mickey Johnson, Mr. Cherry's defense lawyer, got Mr. Burns to admit that he never had any direct proof of Mr. Cherry's involvement in the bombing, despite drinking binges four nights a week.

But prosecutors are hoping that Mr. Burns, a former meat packing plant worker and truck driver, will provide the jury with a link between Mr. Cherry and two bombers who have already been convicted in this case, and show that the defendant was the kind of man who could set a bomb under a church full of people, kill four girls, and then joke about it.

Mr. Burns testified that, in the Birmingham of the 1960's, there were a lot of people who considered themselves Klansmen. But he was the real thing, going to meetings and everything, until an encounter with an F.B.I. agent in the weeks after the bombing changed his mind.

''They showed me the pictures of four pretty little girls,'' Mr. Burns said. ''They were very mangled. It was sickening to look at.''

He went, he said, from being a man who was harassed by the F.B.I. for his Klan ties and views to a man who befriended Klansmen and secretly taped their conversations to turn over to federal agents. Agents installed a reel-to-reel tape recorder behind the spare tire in the trunk of his car, and he used to ride around with Mr. Cherry and Thomas E. Blanton, who was convicted last year of murder in the church bombing, to gather evidence.

''We hit just about every honky-tonk between here and Blount County, and when we got tired of that we hit every one between here and Bessemer,'' he said. As they rode, they talked about the racial situation, about bombs and about many unrelated things.

But he recalled a visit to Mr. Cherry's house, in 1965, and said he heard Mr. Cherry and Mr. Blanton talking about the church bombing. He said he heard Mr. Cherry say ''they think we made the bomb somewhere else.'' He said he believed it was the F.B.I. that Mr. Cherry was talking about. But Mr. Cherry, Mr. Burns said, did not talk about it further.

One night, as he and Mr. Blanton and Mr. Cherry were riding around, they heard a police siren and joked about a conversation that might ensue with the police if they were pulled over. F.B.I. agents had rigged Mr. Burns's car with the recording device that night, and over the rush of wind in the windows, the sounds of the motor and traffic and other noise caught the exchange on tape.

It is hard to tell who was saying what, whether it was Mr. Blanton or Mr. Cherry, but the men joked about being asked: ''Where were you when the church blew up,'' one man said.

''It wasn't us,'' said one man, perhaps the same one. ''We were trying to get ours ready for the weekend.'' That was followed by peals of laughter.

The tape, played for the jury here today, also has segments in which the men in the car discussed alarm clocks as a means to detonate a bomb and batteries as a power source for detonators.

They also mentioned Troy Ingram, who has been identified in F.B.I. and state investigations as a suspected builder of the bomb. He died before Robert Chambliss, the first of the primary suspects to be tried, was convicted in 1977. Herman Frank Cash, another suspect, has also died.

Mr. Johnson hammered at Mr. Burns in cross examination, saying that the government was paying him to get drunk and flirt with women. He chided Mr. Burns for being able to remember a sentence spoken almost 40 years ago but not remembering how much the F.B.I. paid him as an informer. Today, he said it was $60 a month. The lawyer pointed out that Mr. Burns said in earlier testimony that he was paid $200.

The blast, the most horrific of a series of bombings that shook this city in the 1950's and early 1960's, came just five days after the integration of the city's school system.

Forensic experts called by the prosecution said they found no timing device in the rubble -- a key piece of evidence, because the bomb was believed to have been placed under a church stairwell and not thrown from a moving car.

The experts, including an F.B.I. bomb expert, said the timing device could have been vaporized by the blast, which was strong enough to crater the church basement, crush brick and twist iron reinforcing bars.

Prosecutors showed a series of black-and-white pictures of the destruction, pictures they shared with the audience -- including some family members of the murdered girls. They also showed the jury pictures of the girls' mortal injuries, but turned the screen so that the family members did not have to see it.